We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Adelin Gasana a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Adelin, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

Passion is what got me on the road to being an independent documentary filmmaker. Moxie is what led me to accomplish the films that I have been fortunate to have directed and produced in my career. The driving tool to learning the craft of a documentarian is really in the doing part. As the saying goes: “Real knowledge is experiential.” Out in the field you learn how to interact with your story subjects, get a feel of the storyline and dig deep into the research and understanding of your topic. Most documentary filmmakers at one point have worn all the hats in their journey to completing their projects from concept to completion. This could be as a ‘researcher’, ‘writer’, ‘producer’, ‘logger’, ‘publicist’, ‘director’, ‘shooter’, ‘investigator’, ‘editor’, ‘marketer’, and more. Being a documentary filmmaker is being a good communicator and leader of your creative team through all the phases of a film from pre-production to production and post-production; even marketing. A curious mind and the need to raising awareness on a given issue or telling a story in a unique, artistic way is a skillset to have. To be the filmmaker in captivating nuance and perspective is being a “fly on the wall”. This can only be done with honesty and integrity.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I fell in love with the genre of documentary films halfway through high school and began producing and directing documentaries in my freshmen year in college. Subjects I touched on ranged from how history is taught, realities of war, feminism, religion, and the philosophical movement called Existentialism. After graduating I went all in and began my journey from the ground up in the TV/film industry. I moved back to South Florida and began my career in broadcast news while working on my first feature-length documentary entitled, “Cuban America.” This film detailed the Cuban-impact on Miami in the past half-century. It took my two and half years to complete. I went everywhere with it when it was done–film festivals, online, and public screenings at college campuses, libraries and bookstores. It ended up airing on PBS–WLRN, a South Florida TV station. So with my first professional film, I went from an independent filmmaker to a distributed filmmaker.

After that film, I began working at Moguldom Films, a black-owned media company, helping to launch a robust documentary film unit. This brought me to Atlanta, Georgia. We completed over a dozen independent films in a span of three years. Some of the documentaries ended up on Netflix–“A Genius Leaves The Hood” and Amazon Prime–“Gunland.” After Moguldom, I got the opportunity to work on a documentary on the city’s first black mayor, Maynard Jackson. I was the lead archival researcher responsible for researching, retrieving, and clearing every third-party photo and video clip used in the acclaim film entitled, “Maynard”.

In 2020 I released a fashion film entitled “High On Heels”, a 45-minute short on high heels and their experience for women. The film made it to Amazon Prime for a 7-month run. My latest feature film, “Bo Legs” was my first biographical documentary. It highlights the story and work of the Honorable Marvin Arrington, Sr., one of Atlanta’s most influential and significant leaders yet one of its least recognized. After a virtual film festival run in 2021, in which we won several awards, the film premiered on Delta Airlines In-Flight Entertainment in August 2022.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

My ultimate goal in my creative journey as a documentarian is being a “fly on the wall”. I find it important to be the window to another world that audience members may not be familiar with and to lead them through all its nuance and complex yet simple dimensions. I am uninterested in moralizing in my films nor leading a viewer on my or my team’s point-of-view. A simple visual narrative of a given topic or story is enough to fulfill my creative integrity. Being able to creatively pursue a subject matter in order to tell an honest story is my motivation in completing the long, sometimes arduous journey of documentary filmmaking.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

In the simplest answer–it’s telling an honest story. With the concentration of content all over the internet and social media storytelling has taken on different dimensions. Some for the good and the bad. Commentary gets overloaded over facts. Reporting becomes PR or “hit jobs”. So, telling an honest story where focused research on a subject matter is undertaken and nuance is not only appreciated but expressed is one of the many rewarding aspects in completing a documentary film project. I want audiences to appreciate my work for the breadth of knowledge it has and the portrayal of the variations of character and issues discussed. This reward to me is bigger than money, awards, or fame.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.AdelinGasana.com
• Instagram: https://www.Instagram.com/Docujourney_Productions/
• Facebook: http://www.Facebook.com/AdelinGasana
• Linkedin: http://www.Linkedin.com/in/AdelinGasana
• Twitter: http://www.Twitter.com/AdelinGasana
• Youtube: https://www.Youtube.com/Adelin_Gasana